Comments on: gnome-power-manager and multiple batteries

By: hughsie

hughsie — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:08:14 +0000

>it was essentially throwing away information about the reported charge levels of each individual battery

I know, it sucked. The new way of doing things should be The Right Way ™.

By: hughsie

hughsie — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:06:59 +0000

>that only considers the presence of a laptop battery, not any other kind of battery

We only show the mouse battery icon if it’s low — we try not to show the icon unless it’s going to be useful.

By: James Henstridge

James Henstridge — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 01:55:37 +0000

This is great news. I’ll have to give it a try some time.

I had a look at the code in the 2.24 codebase a while back and thought it looked a bit weird. By tracking a discharge profile of the combined virtual battery, it was essentially throwing away information about the reported charge levels of each individual battery. With one of the batteries in my laptop failing at the time, the erratic readings from that battery basically ruined the accuracy of the readings on the other one.

Also, the design looked like it prevented carrying over discharge profiles for a battery when used together with a second battery and when used alone.

It’s good to hear that things are improving.

By: Adam Williamson

Adam Williamson — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:44:57 +0000

This prompted me to poke a bit of g-p-m I hadn’t looked at for a bit: wireless mouse handling.

I thought this was broken, but it’s actually not – if I plug in a wireless mouse and set the icon policy to ‘always’, I get an icon in the notification area which tells me the charge level of the mouse. Shiny. But the icon doesn’t show up if the icon policy is set to ‘present’ – I guess that only considers the presence of a laptop battery, not any other kind of battery…

Also, gnome-power-preferences only lets you set the ‘always’ or ‘never’ policies for the icon. That seems somewhat over-simplified. I can’t see why the UI shouldn’t expose the other choices too.